Hello, I am Samuel Otoo, manager of the Capacity Development and Results unit at the World Bank Institute (WBI).
Since 2009, our team has been developing a body of knowledge around the results of capacity development initiatives. This work is built around the Capacity Development Results Framework (CDRF), and focuses on capacity development as a process of empowerment for local agents in order to advance societal, policy and organizational change initiatives. The overarching objective is to improve the effectiveness of the World Bank’s development assistance, which increasingly focuses on capacity development and other knowledge services.
Lessons Learned:
- Consistent Framing: The CDRF and associated tools provide a systematic approach for designing robust yet flexible capacity development strategies and programs, monitoring and adaptively managing interventions, and for evaluating their results. WBI uses the CDRF to test program logic, and to measure, analyze and report results. A particular feature of the framework is the emphasis on monitoring and managing intermediate level outcomes.
- Triangulation: Given the complexity inherent in most institutional change processes, WBI emphasizes triangulation of evidence and results information from a variety of sources and instruments. Our results database brings together self-ratings by task team leaders, narrative data about outcomes achieved, and results of client feedback surveys. The database enables us to triangulate data from these sources with outcome mapping which requires multiple perspectives to corroborate reports. The key infrastructure is captured by the below diagram:
Rad Resources:
See this overview and paper on the Capacity Development Results Framework, which includes intermediate capacity outcomes and institutional capacities. See also this guide on evaluating results of capacity development, and an analysis of nine case studies on how strategic capacity development can strengthen local ownership of development goals.
Interested in learning more? Attend my panel discussion entitled An Integrated Approach to Results Management in a Knowledge Organization – The Experience of the World Bank Institute with colleagues Dawn Roberts, Jenny Gold, Joy Behrens and Violaine Le Rouzic at the upcoming AEA conference.
This contribution is from the aea365 Tip-a-Day Alerts, by and for evaluators, from theAmerican Evaluation Association. Please consider contributing – send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. Want to learn more from Samuel? He’ll be presenting as part of the Evaluation 2013 Conference Program, October 14-19 in Washington D.C.